The Iraq war and the Future of the Middle East: Historical perspective

(Continued from last week)

Analysis of 1920 also serves another, much needed, function in regard to discussion of the Middle East: namely to discount, if not entirely eliminate, all claims about legitimacy, national identity or cultural continuity that predate this event. In a world where so many analysts, in the region and outside, fall back on explanations in terms of ancient history, holy texts, deep structures, climatic determination or perverse national character (not to mention “Islam”, “clash of civilisations” or “oriental despotism”), the challenge to all those who fall back on historical explanation is for them to show how anything that happened before 1920 is relevant to explaining the middle east of today.
1967 served, therefore, to pull the region back into the box created in 1920, even if it took another three decades for the chimera of partition and of a two-state solution, undoubtedly the best solution, to be cast aside. It had, however, other important consequences, which echo the dramatic words of Abdelrahman Munif about the first world war: kings did indeed fall. Just as after the Suez crisis of 1956 the monarchy fell in Iraq in 1958, and with consequences that continue to be felt, the 1967 war led to a widespread change in the Arab world.
The first manifestation of this was in Aden, the longest-lasting British colony, where the weakening of Egypt in the war with Israel had the paradoxical consequence of unleashing a far-left guerrilla movement that took power in the wake of the British withdrawal in November 1967 and established the People’s Republic of South Yemen, later the only case of an Arab communist state; the second was in Iraq in July 1968, when the Ba’ath Party definitively took power, leading to the thirty-five year rule of Saddam Hussein and his associates; the third was in Libya in September 1969, where the radical military around Muammar al-Gaddafi overthrew King Idris.
The reverberations of 1967 were also felt much nearer home: the Nasserist experiment in “Arab socialism”, already under criticism within Egypt for its corruption and inefficiency, and for the creation of a “new class” of military bureaucrats and entrepreneurs, began its move to the right which Gamal Abdel Nasser’s successor Anwar Sadat was to promote when he took over in September 1970.
In Jordan, the Palestinian guerrillas emerged as an independent force, breaking the controls which the Arab military regimes had imposed on them before June 1967: it was to take King Hussein’s military repression of September 1970, and the long agony of the first phase of the Lebanese civil war (1975-82), before the Arab states were able to bring the Palestinian armed movement under control again.
Three processes - the discrediting of Egypt and Syria in the war in 1967, the rise of the Palestinian fedayeen in Jordan (with calls for the conversion of Jordan into the “North Vietnam” of the Palestinian revolution), and the triumph of the radical National Liberation Front in South Yemen - led some commentators on the left within the Arab world to foresee a new, more radical, phase in the region, what was at the time termed “the crisis of the petty-bourgeois regimes”. The fall of Ahmed Ben Bella in Algeria in 1966 was, for a time, seen as part of the same process.
But, in the longer run, the “crisis of the petty-bourgeois regimes” led not to the rise of the workers, peasants and progressive fishermen, nomads and intellectuals, but to something very different: the rise of the conservative Arab oil states. These, especially after the ensuing Arab-Israeli war of October 1973 and the associated Opec rise in oil prices, were able to use their oil revenues to turn the middle east significantly to the right - towards Islamist conservatism, and, in the context of Afghanistan in the 1980s, to active support for and incitement of the tribal and jihadi counterrevolution in Afghanistan.
This brings the story to 2003. For all the dangers of speculating on the long-run significance of recent events, it is at least plausible to say that the United States invasion of Iraq in that year, with all its consequences within Iraq and the region, may prove to be as important an event as 1967 and, in some respects, on a par with the reordering of the region after 1918. It has already set in train six major processes, which will take years to work themselves through:
the wholesale discrediting of the US and its allies any campaign for the promotion of democracy in the Arab world
the unleashing across the middle east, and more broadly within the Muslim world, of a revitalised militant Islamism, inspired if not organised by al-Qaida, which has used the Iraq war greatly to strengthen and internationalise its appeal
the shattering of the power and authority of the Iraqi state, built by the British and later hardened by the Ba’athists and the fragmentation of Iraq into separate, antagonistic, ethnic and religious zones
the explosion, for the first time in modern history, of internecine war between Sunni and Shi’a in Iraq, a trend that reverberates in other states of mixed confessional composition
the alienation of all sectors of Turkish politics from the west and the stimulation of an authoritarian nationalism there of a kind not seen since the 1920s
the fomenting, albeit in slow motion and with some constraints, of a new regional rivalry, between two groupings: Iran and its allies (including Syria, Hizbollah and Hamas), versus Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan - a rivalry made all the more ominous and contagious by Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.
This is, in Abdelrahman Munif’s words, very much a quaking era. People, within the region and without, are alert to the distant thunder; they do most certainly await the morrow with dread.